Ongoing and invisible crimes against humanity

What comes to mind when you hear the term “economic sanctions”?

For many, it sounds like a clean, non-violent, and measured response to a rogue nation’s behaviour. It’s often presented by news outlets and politicians as a firm but fair disciplinary tool—the global community taking away a misbehaving country’s toys. It’s the civilized alternative to bombs and bullets.

But what if this perception is completely wrong? What if the sanitized language of foreign policy masks a brutal reality of unimaginable structural violence?

A landmark study from the world-renowned medical journal, The Lancet, has pulled back the curtain. The statistics it reveals paint a horrifying picture of what economic sanctions truly are: a modern weapon responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, especially children and the elderly. This isn’t a low-cost policy tool; in many cases, it’s a war fought by other means.

The Lancet Study: Unmasking a Global Catastrophe

It’s one thing to have a suspicion; it’s another to have the data. The report from The Lancet (August 2025 edition*) is not an opinion piece. It’s an extremely rigorous, peer-reviewed econometric analysis. This means its findings have been scrutinized by other eminent data scientists and found to be sound. It is as close to scientific fact as we can get.

The article, “Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality,” establishes a direct causal link between sanctions and increased death rates. This isn’t just a correlation; one causes the other.

Key Findings from the Study:

• Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths Annually: Between 2010 and 2021, unilateral sanctions (those imposed by a single country, almost always the US) led to an estimated 564,000 deaths annually. Sanctions from coalitions (e.g., US and EU) were linked to 629,000 deaths per year.
• A Toll Comparable to War: The combined global death toll from all sanctions is 777,000 people per year. This staggering figure is comparable to the global death toll from war.
• The Most Vulnerable Suffer Most: While sanctions increase mortality across all age groups, they are especially deadly for children under the age of five and older adults (60-80).
• UN Sanctions Are Different: Interestingly, sanctions imposed with UN oversight showed no statistically significant increase in mortality, likely due to greater humanitarian safeguards and oversight—a crucial distinction from unilateral actions.

This data forces us to abandon the idea of sanctions as a mild inconvenience. When a nation imposes sanctions on essentials like baby milk, incubators, and medicine—as happened in Iraq throughout the 1990s—it is waging a war on that country’s civilian population.

A Modern Form of Crime Against Humanity?

The findings of the Lancet study are so severe that they compel us to ask a difficult question: Do economic sanctions constitute a crime against humanity?

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a crime against humanity involves acts committed as part of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.”

Let’s break down how unilateral sanctions might fit this definition:

1. Widespread and Systematic? Sanctions regimes often affect entire populations for decades, as seen in Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The scale—causing over half a million deaths annually—is undeniably widespread.
2. Directed Against Civilians? While often justified as targeting a regime or its military, it’s impossible to separate a country’s economy from its people. Sanctioning food, medicine, and energy infrastructure inevitably and disproportionately harms civilians.
3. Knowledge and Intent? This is often the hardest part to prove, but declassified documents and public statements show that policymakers are frequently aware of the suffering their sanctions will cause. When former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was presented with evidence that sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children, she famously replied, “We think the price is worth paying.” This is, at a minimum, reckless disregard for human life, and arguably, intent.

While no international tribunal has ever prosecuted sanctions as a crime against humanity, the evidence suggests that they are a clear violation of the principles meant to protect civilians from the horrors of war.

The Modern-Day Siege: Starving Nations into Submission

Historically, economic sanctions were first proposed by Woodrow Wilson after World War I as a “peaceful” alternative to conflict. But their true historical parallel is not diplomacy; it’s the medieval siege.

A siege was designed to kill the enemy without risking your own soldiers. You cut off food, you cut off water, and you simply wait for the population inside the castle walls to starve into submission or die.

This is exactly what modern, comprehensive sanctions do. They are designed to inflict so much pain on a civilian population that the people will rise up and overthrow a leader their sanctioners dislike. They are an act of coercion through mass suffering. From Vietnam and Nicaragua in the Cold War to Iraq and Venezuela today, this has been a central—and devastatingly effective—tool of US foreign policy.

The tragedy is that the international systems created after World War II to prevent mass suffering are now being used to enable it. The UN CharterUN Charter Full Description:The foundational treaty of the United Nations. It serves as the constitution of international relations, codifying the principles of sovereign equality, the prohibition of the use of force, and the mechanisms for dispute resolution. The UN Charter is the highest source of international law; virtually all nations are signatories. It outlines the structure of the UN’s principal organs and sets out the rights and obligations of member states. It replaced the “right of conquest” with a legal framework where war is technically illegal unless authorized by the Security Council or in self-defense. Critical Perspective:Critically, the Charter contains an inherent contradiction. It upholds the “sovereign equality” of all members in Article 2, yet institutionalizes extreme inequality in Chapter V (by granting permanent power to five nations). It attempts to balance the liberal ideal of law with the realist reality of power, creating a system that is often paralyzed when those two forces collide.
Read more, which allows for sanctions, has been twisted by powerful nations to impose unilateral measures that bypass the very oversight designed to prevent catastrophe.

The result is a silent, invisible war waged daily against the world’s most vulnerable. The casualties don’t make the evening news, but as the Lancet study proves, they are just as real as those killed on any battlefield.